


Intaglio

by saellys



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canon Rewrite, F/F, Female Friendship, Female Relationships, Gen, Genderswap, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Queer Gen, Recovery, Rule 63
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-10
Updated: 2014-12-11
Packaged: 2018-02-28 21:36:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2747942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/saellys
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Recruitment flyers are all over the expo, and next to the MEPS pavilion is a little Red Cross booth. As soon as Bucky turns her back, puts her arms around the other nurses’ waists, the three of them in crisp new uniforms, real and laughing and better than any propaganda poster, Steve goes over to try her luck. She hasn’t signed up here yet; it’s worth one more shot. </p><p>What happens instead could be considered better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Help! I don't even go here.

Out at the end of the line is Coney Island, and on the occasions when Steve has a day off and isn’t sick they ride out, blinking as the train car goes from the tunnel to bright sunshine. When they transfer to the bus, Bucky tries to carry everything. Steve takes the basket even though--because--it’s heaviest. She hoists it in both hands and keeps her elbows bent and plants her flat feet and does not make a sound as she hauls it across the sand. She sits down next to Bucky again and keeps breathing through her nose, slow and measured, and waits for her pulse to slow. Bucky does her the favor of not acknowledging any of it.

Under the sun Steve can turn lobster red in minutes, so she stays in the umbrella’s shade. Bucky tans. Bucky tans marvelously in her black two-piece. Bucky’s body is discussed by men when they’re not far enough away for Bucky to not hear them, just far enough away that they might not be talking about her specifically. Now that’s a broad. Think she’s got any Italian in her? Dunno, maybe she wants some.

Steve’s body is discussed by men when they’re looking right at her. Why bother? Might as well wear trunks.

Bucky flings sand at their backs, and never misses.

They split a Nehi that’s sickly warm by the last sip, and Steve draws in the sand while Bucky paddles around in the water, and the sun dips and the boardwalk lights up and they get back on the bus and then the train. Bucky always falls asleep on the way home, but carefully, her head leaning back against the seat or forward on the basket, never on Steve’s shoulder. Steve feels the vibrations of the train through the side of Bucky’s knee, because Steve’s feet don’t reach the floor.

People stare. Steve stares right back.

\-----

There is a naked woman reclining in the center of the room when their professor is called away, and then he rushes back in with a wireless. Bucky’s charcoal skids on the paper. She looks up, meets Steve’s eyes, knows that look.

The closest either of them will ever get to the front is the Corps. Bucky chafes, but doesn’t complain, because she got accepted to nursing school back when the first whiff of trouble crossed the ocean, and Steve isn’t eligible, on account of household contact with tuberculosis. Bucky gets her orders. That last night, wandering around the expo with a couple of Bucky’s fellow graduates, she suggests a munitions factory, maybe Stark’s factory. Steve doesn’t want her ass getting pinched every half hour. Fair enough.

Someone overhears.

Recruitment flyers are all over the expo, and next to the MEPS pavilion is a little Red Cross booth. As soon as Bucky turns her back, puts her arms around the other nurses’ waists, the three of them in crisp new uniforms, real and laughing and better than any propaganda poster, Steve goes over to try her luck. She hasn’t signed up here yet; it’s worth one more shot.

What happens instead could be considered better.

\-----

Steve doesn’t know why you’d want to join the Army if you were a beautiful woman. An agent. Peggy is beautiful, but--

What Steve can’t give voice to is the way she wears men’s trousers partly for comfort and partly because dresses hang off her like she ought to be guarding a cornfield. The way she’s never thought of herself as anything other than a woman, but she’s also never been anything qualifying as beautiful, and she and Bucky have had a hundred conversations about how few options there are for the ones in the middle. (Bucky is pretty in the ways that matter to everyone else, and not afraid to be ugly in ways that threaten everyone else.)

What Steve can’t put together is the way Peggy bridges all of it, doesn’t compromise anywhere, and really, she should have been first in line at SSR.

Peggy never tells her why she wasn’t.

A few moments later Peggy asks Steve how she feels.

She feels like how she could have felt if milk had actually made a difference. Like she could have felt if Ma Barnes’ cooking had stuck to her ribs the way it was meant to. Like all the opportunities she never had before are cards spread on a table in front of her, and she can turn over any one she wants. She breathes in. “Taller,” she says.

A few moments later Erskine is dead and Peggy stands calm as a stone in front of a speeding cab and Steve knocks her out of the way, clumsy but at least this time it’s on purpose, and then she’s up and learning to run with new muscle mass, and a Hydra agent goes to all that trouble and then dies for nothing, because the serum he stole is the same one they put in Johann Schmidt. They had the right formula all along, but the wrong test subject.

\-----

Bucky ships out with the 107th, and discovers a handful of gratifying things. First, contrary to the newsreels, nurses don’t wear white in the camp, and her field uniform is a few darts off from a set of fatigues. Morita’s a dab hand with a pair of scissors, and Bucky gets a loaner helmet, cooks stew in it, washes unmentionables in it, jams it on her head when there’s shooting. From a distance, if it weren’t for the armband, she’d look just like everyone else.

Second, although she isn’t technically supposed to see action, it happens. Stanching wounds in a combat zone is a relief--she doesn’t want to be anyone’s angel of mercy. At the front no one proposes to her in a morphine haze. She yells at them over gunfire, rips tourniquets from their undershirts, slaps their faces when eyelids start to droop. Keeps them alive at least until they make it to the field hospital. Feels like a husk afterward, sleeps like a log, wakes up hungry for the next time.

Third, when a soldier gets shot, he usually drops his gun.

The first time Bucky pulls a dead man’s rifle from the mud and fires back at the Nazis, she kills two, she thinks, and gets a formal reprimand. If they wanted her here for that, it would have been part of her four weeks of basic. The beautiful thing is that she’s not really an officer; relative rank doesn’t mean jack, and this is the only time that’s ever worked in her favor. And they can’t exactly afford to get rid of her. Next morning there’s a makeshift shooting range at the edge of camp, and she and two other nurses take turns with an M1. After a while, they start moving the targets back when it’s Bucky’s turn.

That doesn’t help her much at Azzano.

Bucky expects torture, but she’s not sure this qualifies. She says her name, rank, and serial number anyway, when she hears footsteps. She says it when they give her another round of injections. She says it even though no one asks her anything. She says it until her eyes unfocus and she hypnotizes herself with the words and numbers, and the part of her that can still be wry says that at least she won't forget who she is.

The little bespectacled man comes and goes. From time to time he pats her hand, which she can feel but not move. His bedside manner is significantly better than hers. “Nurse Barnes,” he said when first they put her on the table, when she thrashed and kicked because she thought she knew what was coming but she didn’t, she didn’t, “we are so fortunate to have you here.”

\-----

The 107th walks into camp with a Hydra tank and a few new members, interrupting the conversation where Peggy is about to lose everything she has worked to build.

In the dim pub where her top squad is prepping for duty, Steve looks at Peggy in her crimson dress, and then at Bucky with her uniform cape folded back at one shoulder so the lining shows.

The next morning she tries to scrub the red off her lips with the back of her hand. “I didn’t think we had any. Um.” Peggy stops, turns, gives her a look.

The shield is unpainted, and as sloped as Steve’s back used to be. The shield fits. The shield works.

Phillips asks, once, when Steve and Peggy are both far enough away that he can say it in a lowered voice, if the Howling Commandos are sure they want to follow Steve. Dugan answers, loud enough to turn every head in the basement, that they wouldn’t follow anyone else.

Jones and Dernier teach Steve to speak French, and she finally figures out what fondue is. She feels like a heel.

Peggy will be in the documentaries, someday, but she isn’t in the newsreels they send back--apart from the inside of a compass. Nurse Barnes is in the newsreels. Nurse Barnes wraps up Falsworth’s shoulder, and then shoves his other shoulder when he makes a joke. Nurse Barnes lays down suppressing fire, and ANC enlistment takes a ten percent bump.

Steve can still feel the vibration of the train under her feet in a blitzed pub.

She tells Peggy about how she can’t get drunk. She has the last surviving bottle of wine on the block, and given her heightened sense of everything including taste, she can appreciate that it passes muster for a house red in England, but there’s no payoff beyond that. Peggy tells Steve to allow Barnes the dignity of her choice. It’s dignity that sticks. Steve asks if Bucky's condolence letter included her rank.

Peggy isn’t sure. “Will you tell them to?” Steve says, and it’s a favor, not an order. “She was a captain.”

\-----

In Italy in the rain, back when all that separated Steve from the rest of the chorus girls was the fact that she had tights instead of fishnets, Peggy moved to sit closer, and as she touched up Steve’s lipstick, she told Steve she was meant for more than this.

On a runway cut into an alp, Steve ends up wearing the same color, and doesn’t wipe it off. The only thing Phillips says about it is that he’s not kissing her.

There isn’t anything special about Steve, not really. She’s just a kid from Brooklyn, whose parents didn’t bother hiding how much they wanted a boy, and didn’t live long enough for her to show them she didn’t need to be one to make them proud.

Sometime later, Steve says she’d hate to step on Peggy’s feet--

\-----

For a long time, little girls in Brooklyn paint the undersides of trash can lids. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If Steve Rogers loving memes is wrong, I don't want to be right.

Sam Wilson asks Steve if she misses the good old days. Things aren’t so bad, though, and if she had time for more than an abbreviated list, Steve might tell her that she’s sanguine about the fact that she slept through the last seventy years.

Being on ice meant she didn’t need to find something to do after the war ended. She would have, of course, there would have been fame and victory tours for a long time afterward. But even Peggy got married and started a family, lived a life. Steve couldn’t imagine...

She shrugs, ends the list with a reference they’ll both understand. “Much progressive.”

Sam’s grin goes broad, in part because she’s sharing a meme with a ninety-five-year-old, and in part because this is a world where people think sexism ended in the forties when America built a woman who met their standards, but walk down any street in D.C. and men still tell you to smile, sweetheart. “Very equality,” Sam says. They both say, “Wow.” Internet: so helpful.

Then Natasha’s there in her ridiculous car, but you can’t run everywhere. Later Natasha suggests Steve ask Kristen from statistics out, and Steve jumps out of a plane, which isn’t an answer, but it kind of is.

\-----

She looks out the window of her apartment, and then back at the woman she hit on five minutes ago, and says, “Tell them I’m in pursuit.” Throws herself through windows, doors, walls. Gets a bruise from her own damn shield, and she’s still too late.

When she tells Natasha about the shooter, Natasha draws a deep breath, trying to be silent. They both stand for a long time by Fury’s body, until Hill comes to take him away, and in the hall Natasha tells Steve she’s a terrible liar.

Steve walks out with Rumlow. Men make up eighty-three percent of STRIKE; S.H.I.E.L.D. agents are approaching an even split, with a curve that starts in administrative positions. Outside Pierce’s office, Steve acknowledges her neighbor.

Inside Pierce’s office, it’s easiest to assume everyone is lying to her. She’s seen what they keep under the Potomac. The expectation that she’ll dance this way, give an endorsement, when all she wants is to get to work… well, what’s changed? Not a whole hell of a lot.

Steve gets on the elevator.

\-----

“I only act like I know everything, Rogers.” But Natasha knows the woman who killed Fury is the same woman who shot Natasha’s engineer straight through her five years ago. Steve bets she looks terrible in a bikini now. Point is, the Winter Soldier is a ghost story.

Public displays of affection make people very uncomfortable, but after a few seconds Steve notices how Natasha’s mouth tastes faintly of black coffee and beeswax. It’s not Steve’s first kiss since 1945. Top three, though.

Natasha asks Steve who she wants her to be, and Steve has never had to change who she is, but she thinks she understands a sliver of what Natasha means. When Steve suggests a friend, Natasha says she might be in the wrong business.

\-----

The Winter Soldier opens her eyes, and does not remember exactly why she aches.

The arm is heavy. She rests it on Pierce’s kitchen table. The arm changes her gait, forces her hips off-center, runs a line of tension from one shoulder to the opposite calf. Every time they bring her out of the ice, she takes a moment to find her balance, but just a moment. The only memory she has now is muscle memory.

Not the only memory, no.

 _Save yourself_ , they told her, and shut her inside a room with four men, eight men. Twelve. Unarmed, first, then they had sticks, then guns. She was the experiment, but they were the ones who died, and once she proved she was viable with nothing more than fear and raw strength, then there was training.

They were pleased to discover that the foundation was already laid for grace and economy of motion (sunbeams in dust motes when she was little, learning to plié in an old woman’s attic converted to a school). The arm works as counterweight to throw herself into a spin.

Something in her waited. She could stop anytime, lay down and let them beat her almost to death, starve herself until they put in a feeding tube, but if she cooperated, she'd at least be able to walk under her own power when someone--

 _Save yourself_ , they told her, and dropped her in the tundra, and a black helicopter followed her but never turned on its lights, and she came back to base wrapped in wolf pelts.

They were pleased at her marksmanship, and refined the tactile feedback of the arm for a hair trigger.

Killing was always a part of saving herself. Gradually, they put her in fewer situations where the threat was imminent, some where she was the only thing that counted as a threat. They stopped telling her to save herself. The killing never changed.

She took hits, of course, bullets when the others were fast, punches when the others were close. She woke for, at most, a week at a time. How long between thaws? It never occurred to her to wonder. Stitched herself up (muscle memory) when she was too deep in the field for immediate attention. Went back into the ice with bruises and unhealed wounds and a knot of hopelessly locked muscle over her right hip. Wakes up with all of that but not the memory of why, until she steps forward on her left foot and catches herself, adjusts, remembers to hold the arm bent, high and slightly behind her, when she runs.

The notion of giving up withered away when there was no more threat. The part of her that waited, the part that would have answered to her name, went to sleep when it finally accepted no one was coming for her. All that's left is the mission.

“They already cost me Zola,” says Pierce, and she knows the name, raises her head. Not the only memory. “I want confirmed death in ten hours.”

\-----

Sam says, “Whoever she used to be, the girl she is now… I don’t think she’s the kind you save. I think she’s the kind you stop.”

Steve stands as still as she did on the street the day before. A long time ago, Bucky told her it wasn’t Captain America she was following into the jaws of death. No one else is left who knew the other girl from Brooklyn, no one who still sees her in the Winter Soldier’s face.

“I’m not sure I can do that,” Steve says to Sam. She’s learned a thing or two about compartmentalization; her mission objective overlaps, but it’s not the same. If she can’t get Bucky back, this is all just a zero sum. Either way, she’ll get the job done.

“Your name is Gemma Buchanan Barnes,” she tells Bucky as the helicarrier shatters around them. One mission complete.  “I’m not going to fight you.” And she's too stupid to run away. The shield falls with the rest of the debris.

Steve couldn’t imagine coming back from the war and settling down, starting a family the way she would ultimately, inevitably, have been expected to. She couldn’t imagine watching Peggy do it. She couldn’t imagine Bucky settling for anything less than a rifle in her hands and a target in her sights. Steve didn’t want to imagine Bucky in her place either, waking up to discover the enemy no longer dresses in a conveniently recognizable uniform. In the years since Steve woke up, in the worst, loneliest moments, she has sometimes thought Bucky had the better luck.

“You’re my mission,” Bucky says, and Steve lets Bucky hit her, as hard as she wants.

Something breaks. 


	3. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> One year later.

Natasha gets back to the farm late, and knows something's off as soon as she steps onto the front porch. It would bother her more if this was the first time. 

As it is, she doesn’t turn on the lights. Clint sleeps, or pretends to, on the sofa. Natasha goes to the kitchen, and in the corner there’s a shadow resting one arm on the tabletop, and Pizza Dog has his chin on the Winter Soldier’s knee. 

Natasha takes stock. Bucky’s hair and face are clean; she still has dark circles under her eyes, but they’re not nearly as deep as before. Her right arm has healed and she doesn’t seem to have any problems as she scratches the dog behind the ears. She wears long sleeves, and the cut of the shirt is loose around her torso, as far as one can get from a cinched leather vest. Soft fabric, probably warm, dark grey. Darker spots stain it, and Natasha wonders if this was an affectation the shirt had from the beginning, if Bucky picked it up secondhand because she doesn’t think she should have nice things, or if it’s an attempt at night camo. 

Bucky’s black leggings are probably fleece-lined, and her boots look heavy. Natasha is trying to plan Christmas presents: a sketchbook for Steve, a donation in Sam’s name to the place two towns over where they rehab birds of prey. She doesn’t think Bucky will mind clothes. It’s hard to start over with nothing when you’re ninety-eight.

“Она хочет тебя видеть,” Natasha says. 

Bucky stops scratching Lucky. “Я не готов.” 

Natasha knows something about revenge, and she heard Rumlow turned up dead in an elevator a couple weeks back. “You’re leaving a trail. There are easier ways to send a message.” 

Small engines whine as Bucky shrugs. She says, “The message isn’t for Steve.” 

The Winter Soldier is coming in from the cold; anyone who doesn’t leave her and Steve the hell alone gets their neck snapped. As messages go, it’s simple, and Natasha can relate. 

“Fair enough.” Bucky read everything that went public under #SecretsofS.H.I.E.L.D., but Natasha always had secrets they didn’t know. “Who do you want next?” 

“I’ve been putting off Stark.”

Natasha knows something about penance, too. 

She still has a couple access codes that might get Bucky past the first few floors of the tower. She writes them on the back of Pepper’s business card. “Hope he doesn’t take it amiss before you have a chance to make your apology.”

Bucky grimaces. “Same.” She takes the card and walks out through the living room. Pizza Dog whimpers, bereft. He's a good judge of character.

“До Свидания,” Clint says from the sofa. Natasha sees moonlight reflect from Bucky’s hand as she signs _See you later_. 

Natasha sits at the table and rubs Lucky’s back, and Clint wanders in to make some coffee. _How long do you figure?_ he signs. 

_She’s almost done. A month, maybe two._

Clint’s mouth twists. _Merry Christmas, Steve. Here’s your very own recovering assassin._

And isn’t that just the gift that keeps on giving?

\-----

When Bucky is ready, she goes to the VA and reads the bulletin board. There’s a potluck on Thursday for anyone who doesn’t have somewhere else to be. The address is familiar. She hasn’t quite got the hang of cooking again, so when she knocks on the door with her right hand, her left holds a carton of eggnog, non-alcoholic. 

The look on Steve’s face isn’t exactly surprise. More like she hadn't let herself hope for this. You feel more, after the serum: kinesthesia, pain, emotions. Bucky watches a few of the latter cross Steve’s face, and she feels like this might be a good time to try a smile, but she hasn't quite got the hang of that again either, so she's not sure how it looks. “I’m so glad you’re here,” Steve says. 

Bucky steps into the apartment, and Steve puts her arm around her, warm against the places where Bucky’s back aches. The bullet holes in the wall have been plastered over. In the living room, Sam waves, and Steve tells everyone, “This is Captain Barnes.” 

She clears her throat, takes a breath. “Just Bucky.”

**Author's Note:**

> This began with felixandria's incredible artwork (http://felixandria.tumblr.com/post/102258201291/baby-girl, http://felixandria.tumblr.com/post/89985607851/i-have-needs-that-are-not-being-met-by-this-fandom), and was further sparked by that post that's going around Tumblr about how it's easier to watch the denial of a character's agency and the manipulation of their mind and body when that character is a man. I stirred in some leftover _Bletchley Circle_ feels, and, well. There it is. I'm reasonably sure every single bit of it has been done before.
> 
> I researched like whoa for this, and if I screwed anything up with regard to historical accuracy or MCU accuracy, please don't hesitate to leave a comment here or message me at hauntedjaeger.tumblr.com.


End file.
